Abstract

Multimedia platforms have become living archives for spectacle and normalized cruelty, inviting audiences to watch and watch again. What does it mean to consume media that is despicable in both content and form? What are the impacts of doing so repetitively? What is the appeal of public revelation? In his book Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment, Casey Ryan Kelly unpacks the role of spectatorship and consumption related to obscene enjoyment. Paying attention to manners of disclosure, Kelly uses psychoanalytic theory to work through how public revelations speak to racist and misogynistic underpinnings of whiteness. Through case studies on public freak out videos, leaked audio files, and viral sex-tapes, Kelly explores the perpetual feedback loop of grandiose public revelation to achieve post-racialism. This critique shifts accountability from an individual issue to a structural consequence of white-masculine power.Kelly's introduction, “On Obscene Enjoyment,” contextualizes the role of the viewer by outlining the variables of his analysis. Speaking in conversation with traditional notions of secrecy and surveillance by scholars such as Jodi Dean and Douglas Kellner, Kelly centers the appeal of a public matter that was initially private. Disclosure itself creates the perception of an authentic reality behind closed doors. The spectatorship involved reflects a particular perversion wherein the viewer knows it is wrong to look yet looks anyway. It is from this perspective that Kelly introduces Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically the role of jouissance, to address satisfaction that is sought out by the subject through unattainable means. This “lack” in the self moves the subject toward desire. Watching and listening to publicized privacies creates a moment of significance, of forbidden enjoyment, which scapegoats structural inequity with the individual outburst to unconsciously assure the white subject that their power “still exists” (18). Drawing a throughline between the spectator, white masculinity, and lethal jouissance, Kelly presents a theoretical framework to prepare the reader for what's to come.In Chapter 1, Kelly measures whether “publicized exposure” of obscene behavior ends up stopping white masculine violence (30). Analyzing a leaked tape of a sexually violent tirade by director Mel Gibson, a public outburst by former Seinfeld star Mike Richards, and a racist sex-tape by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, this chapter examines the double movement of public obscenity as it relates to whiteness. First, these artifacts create the illusion of an instance that has been overcome, playing further into the fantasy of post racialism. Secondly, the instance is also experienced as an ongoing threat. These archived obscenities reinforce white anxiety, demonstrating that racism is “embedded in the white racial unconscious” (43). From this perspective, racism and misogyny are acts of obscene enjoyment, where white desire is projected onto the subjugated Other. Gibson, Richards, and Hogan display how the white imaginary influences dominance throughout the population from “knowledge of racial complicity” (33). This is not to excuse it but rather to understand the depth in which primal fantasies control white masculinity. Understanding the dependence whiteness has on the racialized other becomes crucial to contextualizing the spectator's role in this process.Chapter 2 explores the depths of white anxiety through discourses surrounding Los Angeles Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, and his girlfriend at the time, V. Stiviano. Unlike the blatantly racial epithets of the first case study, Sterling scapegoats his internalized racism with an argument of culture. After Stiviano, a Black and Latina woman, had been spending time at an NBA game with Black friends, Sterling demanded that she stop “broadcasting” her association with Black people (56). Despite being the owner of a predominantly Black team and dating a Black woman, Sterling felt “there was a culture” he, and Stiviano by association, needed to abide by in public. This culture, Kelly argues, normalizes plantation culture to mask white men's phobic response to racialized bodies (56). Using the frame of Lacanian anxiety, Kelly discusses both racial capital and white denialism as essential subjects to understanding how white power becomes more associated with humanness than other racial identities. The broadcasting of Sterling's private racism reveals a white anxiety regarding people of color occupying traditionally white environments. Kelly uses the language of contamination to conceptualize the reality of what Sterling's logics were trying to convey. While Sterling blames culture for his racist claims, he fails to acknowledge consequences of the role he plays in maintaining it.In Chapter 3, Kelly investigates the particular gratifications that occur from viewing and circulating public racist meltdowns. Charting his digital ethnographic analysis of YouTube's algorithm, Kelly demonstrates how the excessive publication and viewership of racist freak out compilations reveal a racist jouissance, allowing white viewers to experience the pleasure of the irruption of hysterical behavior while simultaneously shielding them from their own complicity. Working closely with the work of Joshua Gunn, Kelly turns to aesthetics of pornography and fantasy to explain the disidentification that results from such content. He reveals that the “repeated viewing of people of color subjected to humiliation is ultimately the benefit of the spectator rather than the victims of hate speech” (101). Kelly applies this conclusion across all four case studies to account for the obscene pleasure associated with repetitive absolution.The final case study, Chapter 4, spotlights the rhetoric around the Access Hollywood hot-mic tape leaked during Donald Trump's first presidential campaign. The conversation features a violent and sexually explicit conversation between two men, discussing their entitlement to a woman's body. Kelly connects this to Freud's myth of the primal horde, a parable involving a totem representing a dead father as the end to excess enjoyment for the paternal figure and renewed enjoyment for those who saw the totem thereafter. Trump's election represents a “logical extension of the decline of the paternal signifier” (105). When Trump makes the claim that “when you are a celebrity, they let you [grab ‘em by the pussy],” he is declaring a form of political power and celebrity that is grounded in a state of exception. His role as the primal father fosters the “passive masochistic attitude” that “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force” (108). In combination with the fact that this tape is audio only, Trump's statements become demands for his own desire: How can we please him? From this position of power, his statements function as a test of loyalty to listeners—the dynamic conditions his audience to divert agency to him. For this reason, the Access Hollywood tape is not an embarrassing exposure but rather one that revealed the truth of Trump's ideology as it related to political power. Trump's statements invite audiences to be the object of desire as the politician ruthlessly sought out his own.Kelly ends the book with an Epilogue titled “On Pointless Enjoyment.” In these final pages, Kelly notes that media spectatorship will always exist from unconscious desire. It is not just what is caught on tape and then publicly viewed but instead the compulsion that is fed through repetitive viewing. Kelly offers this as his entry point into rhetorical criticism, explaining that people are hailed into viewership that feeds into one's desire. His objective is to make sense of “what white masculinity discloses about itself” and the audience dynamics created through simultaneous public and private admission (127).Kelly offers a solution: a “defense of accountability that starts with the subject's avowal of desire” (133). In other words, we need to separate white masculinity from the death drive so that white victimhood may be curtailed in relation to oppressive or violent actions. Shifting accountability to the self moves the impulse the spectator feels toward the Other and “traverses the narcissism of liberal fantasy” by further understanding the lack that seeks fulfillment (131). Moments of obscene enjoyment are the result of a lack of a lack—a pursuit of satisfaction that results in pushing blame onto the Other. The shift Kelly is calling for toward accountability reverses the direction of lack back to the self, demanding self-reflection in a body that is often understood as victimless.Kelly's careful analysis of the digital shift from private to public is crucial for scholars in rhetorical studies as we grapple with complacency in everyday consumption. Expanding on his previous book, Apocalypse Man, Kelly deftly guides readers through psychoanalytic theory toward the intersections of imagined fantasy and obscene reality to understand the influence that viewership has on the self and the Object. This charge ultimately centers concern for accountability, sharing with readers the powers of acknowledgment. While readers might question the extent to which acknowledgment can foster significant change, Kelly claims that we must understand the fantasy to unravel it. He masterfully crafts a vision of the intangible to bring forward the function it has in our conscious reality. The research is deep and unapologetic, emphasizing the simplicity of the obscure. While I wish this call toward accountability were expanded upon in each chapter rather than the epilogue alone, Kelly's argument still prompts questions of change, rather than within the Other, within ourselves.Caught on Tape brings forward the importance of understanding our own consciousness and consumption patterns as they pertain to the systemic violence of whiteness. It indicates that voyeurism is never passive and repetition never coincidental. The invisible tethers of hegemony continue to command power in moments both immediately and after-the-fact. The excruciating pleasure we encounter in the process is what keeps us tied in the meantime. Kelly's manuscript is a crucial read for scholars at the intersections of digital rhetoric, whiteness, and surveillance, as we posit answers to continuously pressing questions of ideology, ethics, and technology.